Diet Drug Firm Accused of Funding Favorable Articles

A company that manufactured part of the diet drug combo fen-phen hired ghostwriters for articles promoting obesity treatment and then used prominent researchers to publish the works under their names, according to lawsuit evidence cited in a newspaper report Sunday.

The legal action claims that Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, which made the “fen” half of the drug combination, hid health risks associated with the drugs. The company allegedly tried to play down or remove descriptions of side effects from the articles, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Only two of the 10 articles paid for by Wyeth actually were published in medical journals before the company pulled the drugs from the market in September 1997, when studies linked the combo to heart valve damage a lung disease.

Officials at Wyeth, a division of American Home Products Corp., defended the articles.

“This is a common practice in the industry. It’s not particular to us,” Wyeth spokesman Doug Petkus said. “The companies have some input, it seems, in the initial development of the piece . . . but the proposed author has the last say.”

One of the published researchers, Dr. Albert J. Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania, said he had no idea that Wyeth financed or edited his article. Had he known, he would not have participated, he said. He said he threw away the first draft supplied by an intermediary medical writing company and wrote his own work.

The “fen” in fen-phen refers to Pondimin (fenfluramine) and Redux (dexfenfluramine), both sold by Wyeth. Phentermine, the other half of the combo, is not made by Wyeth and is still available.

Six million people in the United States took Pondimin or Redux.

Wyeth and a company it acquired hired Excerpta Medica Inc. to write the 10 articles, the Morning News reported.

Excerpta, based in Belle Mead, N.J., planned to submit most of the papers to medical journals owned by its parent company, Reed Elsevier Plc, the newspaper reported.

The Morning News reported that Wyeth officials said in depositions that the two published articles were reviewed for fairness by independent panels at the journals.